General Language Thread

The plural of Jesus is Joshuas.

(The names are the same in Hebrew... and several other languages for that matter. I've never been able to find a reason for how or why English split it into to different names).

Edit for page-topper.

Edited by KnightofLsama on Dec 21st 2022 at 12:36:38 PM

If Jesus is Joshua, son of Joseph, does it make him...[JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Jojo?]

Huh. That was surprisingly simple.

I know exactly which twitter post you are referencing there.

I would go with "Jesuses," just as it's correct to say "statuses" and "sinuses." All of them are fourth-declension Latin nouns (at least in the form we've borrowed "Jesus" in), and the correct Latin plural would be -ūs.

Now, English doesn't borrow that plural ending the way it does for most other Latin declensions, so standard usage dictates adding regular English -es to the entire word. (That said, Iesus in Latin IS an irregular noun, with uncharacteristic Iesū in the vocative and all the oblique cases!)

Today I noticed this Language Log article.

It discusses the use of media as a singular count noun (by a native French speaker in fact).

I thought it might be worth mentioning here, since we use this word quite often.

Question. Do we have separate threads for languages like Spanish or Japanese?

We don't have separate threads for any language.

It would be an opportunity to start a separate thread for those dedicated languages. I myself am learning Spanish and Japanese on Duolingo, but I want to expand on other places. Duolingo's forums are closed and their streak system (which I'm aiming for 1000; currently at 918) is a drag for me (I'm constantly reminded that I have streaks to finish, and I sometimes do it either before midnight or in the wee hours of the morning). A general thread like this would feel volatile for me when learning mainly Spanish or Japanese because it would suddenly talk about French.

I don't think that's going to work, this thread already gets very little traffic as it is.

Speaking of Duo Lingo, I'm starting to run into cases where the translation from French to Dutch results in odd Dutch phrases that we just don't use ("we maken de koffie klaar" instead of "we zetten koffie" for "nous préparons le café").

And yeah, it seems like commentaries have been shut down. The commentary for this one is 2 years old, and clearly nothing was being done with it.

Ugh, I still occasionally run into stuff doing Duolingo for Spanish for English speakers, and that's one of the more common combinations, I'd think. (Usually writing a translation from English into Spanish that's actually correct but isn't accepted; I've done the >there's something wrong>my translation should have been accepted form sometimes and had a few of my corrections accepted by the team later.) I'd say do that issue correction form if you can, but if you get what they 'want' anyway even though the Dutch is not how you would actually say it, that may not be possible.

Duolingo is, from everything I've heard, okay. Not great, not awful, just okay. And a lot of it is a predilection for phrases that aren't really that helpful.

Like, I tried out Japanese for a while and it eventually clicked that it was really focusing on phrases like "could you please open a window?" and "I think the door is stuck". And apparently it's not good at all at teaching pronouns, it ends up going overly formal.

That's funny, for French it seems to be avoiding the formal forms. Twelve chapters in and they have yet to introduce the "vous" verb form (polite singular/plural you).

I think it's a good starter for learning a language, but yeah, you'd need more instruction than that. Even just explaining a bit of grammar would be a great help, instead of just letting you guess.

I've found a lot of language education is...kinda bad.

I had to take a beginner (like really beginner) French class in high-school. The class was explicitly designed for people with no French knowledge.

It assumed you already knew all the words and didn't know how to arrange them.

I remember the textbook we used for Mandarin studies was abjectly awful. Barely explained the grammar conceits for non-natives or even for Chinese speakers more familiar with other lects. Also the vocabulary list was atrocious. Very little in the way of useful common phrases, or they were buried deep in later lessons, meanwhile a lot of the phrases pertained to incredibly obscure terms even few native mainlanders would care about.

My parents who have a bit more native familiarity with Mandarin pointed out to me that it was also incredibly biased towards the Beijing dialect, not bothering to explain that standardized Mandarin frequently dropped certain endings and flourishes that the textbook asked us to always include.

Edited by AlleyOop on Feb 13th 2023 at 10:06:42 AM

Kinda reminds me of how people tell you to not try and learn Japanese from anime. It's weird and stilted sounding and people tend to talk in a really exaggerated way in anime, and it just comes off strange to everyone else.

I heard it'd be sort of like someone who talks like they're in a Wes Anderson movie. They'd be understood pretty easily...but you'd think there was something wrong with the way they're talking, even if you can't quite pin down what it is.

On the whole, too many language applications and books go too far with the notion that you can learn a language well without ever getting under its hood, as it were. I know the very concept of grammar intimidates some people ... but there's sugarcoating it on the one hand, and then there's pretending that you'll never need to reckon with it, or that you can take it in by pure osmosis. That's a recipe for disappointment.

I was wondering, why do the French not have a word for weekend? Le week-end sounds very English to me.

I'll guess that's because it's a Romance language instead of a Germanic derivated one, in Spanish you also do not have a single word for weekend, instead you have "fin de semana" or "end of the week".

Over here we kinda call it Satu-Sunday.

Yeah, I know that one. Wouldn't translating that literally into French give you a very similar 'fin du semaine'? ...Is that used at all or something similar? It does seem a bit strange to hear 'le week-end' knowing that French is usually very hostile to loan words.

Spanish as well, at least the Iberian one, the American one is a bit more ambivalent about loan words but in general discourages them.

Edited by raziel365 on Mar 21st 2023 at 8:14:31 AM

It'd be "fin de semaine" (the article that goes with "semaine" is "la", and only "le" combines with prepositions). But everyone I know would use that phrase to refer to the end of the work week rather than Saturday and Sunday, and "weekend" is firmly entrenched for those 2 days (at least in France).

As for hostility to loanwords, the Académie Française definitely is, but pretty much everyone agrees they're a bunch of useless old farts and ignores them. We have taken words from other languages throughout history, even if not as easily or casually as English.

Edited by Khudzlin on Mar 21st 2023 at 3:59:52 AM

Speaking of the academies, I wonder if the current attitude of dismissal is not exactly warranted.

Don't get me wrong, the Royal Academy of Spanish is also pompous as hell, but I do think there's still some use on having an organization that follows the logic of a language, if only for cultural purpouses.

I do have an allergy to loanwords when there’s no effort to adapt them to the languages’s phonology to some degree.

Like, I want to slap every French person who says "le taïming" in the face.